The Household Cyclopedia of General Information

This 1881 reference book was designed to help nineteenth-century households stay healthy and productive. Need to know how to winter your bees? Build a barometer? Bleed a patient with leeches? Your answers are here. The site, a part-time project of freelance webmaster Matthew Spong, evokes a time when many households were largely self-sufficient, and the value of a book explaining how to amputate a limb, for example, could be immeasurable. Spong discovered Henry Hartshorne's wonderful compendium in a market in Sydney and has almost completed scanning the text and converting it to HTML. We look forward to the final chapter, Miscellaneous, containing everything from Proof-reading to Dialysis.